RBWords - Volume 19 - Number 4: April 2006
Something to Think About
Outside the window of my office here in The McConnell House (the official name of the home I live in), I can see my iris garden which is coming gloriously into full bloom. (More about this in a minute.) Beyond the iris, a few yards away, is the cemetery of the Kentucky Dominican sisters. Generations of Dominican women are buried there. (This congregation was founded here in 1822 in response to a plea from a Dominican friar, Fr. Samuel Wilson OP, for women to teach local Catholic children. Nine local women responded!) Both the iris garden and the cemetery are speaking to me of death and resurrection. I brought the iris with me from New Orleans to San Antonio to Kentucky. They did not bloom in San Antonio (and neither did I those two years 2003-2005). I feel as if they are speaking for me.
The sisters buried in the cemetery represent the heritage of a pioneering group of women whose successors, like so many other congregations of religious women in these years, are struggling with decisions about an uncertain future. They are in conversation with several other small congregations of Dominican women about a possible future together in the form of a federation or perhaps a new entity. No matter which choice is made, it will mean a kind of death and resurrection. Is death by “dying out” preferable to death by assuming a new identity? Fidelity to the lives and memory of those buried in their congregational cemeteries must be placed alongside a question of the future of those memories. The decisions are heart- and gut-wrenching.. At every celebration of the Eucharist, there are prayers for the “congregations of the cluster.” This kind of discussion is going on all over our church. Although in the USA, it seems particularly manifest in women’s religious life, it is happening in many male religious congregations as well. It is little comfort to note that the vast majority of religious orders founded in the history of the church have disappeared, even in periods when ”vocations” were plentiful. We Dominicans would like to think that our almost 800 year tradition will endure, but there are no guarantees!
Perhaps “planted” in new soil, an older plant will have a renewal of spirit, a blossoming “resurrection,” like my iris. The prophet, Ezekiel, despaired at the vision of dry bones (Chap. 37), but God commanded him to call them to life. The sisters buried here (and in congregational and provincial cemeteries elsewhere) and the blooming iris are voices commanding our dry bones to “hear the Word of the Lord” and live for a new future. IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
It Has Been Said
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn: We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind…which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.
From THE WEIGHT OF GLORY by C.S.Lewis